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Saturday, March 7, 2009

Easy to Be Hard

I was procrastinating for the last few days. I told myself I was too busy to take on my freelance writing assignment just yet, but in truth, I was doing everything but that. I thought it would take me forever, so I did the easy stuff first.

My old boss Michael Krumper once said to me that one of the biggest things he'd learned from one of his old bosses was to make the difficult calls first. In my life, I find the hard stuff takes so long that you end up spending most of your life struggling and then regretting all the things you didn't get to. In high school, I paid attention during SAT prep classes when they told me to answer all the easy questions first, and then to go back to the harder work. I've applied that principle to almost everything in my life.

Maybe that's what makes me the busiest unemployed person you've ever met. The hardest thing is actually finding the right job. You can easily fill your time with everything else.

When I actually got down to my writing assignment today, it was a snap. I have plenty of time tonight and tomorrow to goof off before getting serious again on Monday.

So the next time I start to ask the question, "Why does everything have to be so hard?", I'm going to stop myself to make a slight edit, and ask rather, "Why does everything have to seem so hard?" I think things become easier over time. The more time you have to think about a problem, the more prepared you are to solve it. The more time I waste before writing a press release, the more I already have it basically written in my head when I go to type it out.

Let the problems melt and soften in the sun, get a little mushed up and more readily chewed. In the meantime, I've got a bunch of easy stuff to do.